I’ve long known about and resisted adopting OpenID for one reason: I feared that I would be at the mercy of whatever company I chose as my OpenID provider, be it Google, Yahoo, Verisign, whatever…

If that company went out of business, decided to “realign with core competencies”, start charging exorbitant fees for using the OpenID, I’d be screwed, as my digital identity for all these sites would be under their control.

The alternative is running your own OpenID provider, but that’s a good amount of work, and kind of defeats the purpose of OpenID (if everyone has to run their own provider).

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Holy fuck, Mrs. Dalloway is literally the best book I have ever read. Okay, maybe I’m just getting older and more able to appreciate literature now, but holy fuck, it’s awesome.

The love story that encompasses the whole book is between Peter Walsh and Clarissa Dalloway. Peter loved Clarissa – totally. So when she rejected him to marry someone safer, he leaves for India and really never loves again. Some would consider his life wasted and him a failure.

Clarissa on the other hand, has gotten everything she’s wanted, supposedly. She’s married a politician and has status in London high society. Except this book is written in stream of consciousness, and Peter and Clarissa pervade each others’ thoughts the whole day. It’s absurdly obvious that theirs is the defining relationship of both their lives.

You might think that it’s basically a chick flick book. Except it’s not. There’s no happy ending, and most of the book is intellectual ruminations. I suppose it is a bit sentimental… but whatever. I finished the book wearing earplugs because I needed absolute concentration. When I got to the end, I laid there in my bed for a few minutes going: “What the fuck… holy fuck… what just hit me”.

This is a fucking book, a dead tree, that had scenes to impact my heart rate and make me produce girly noises, thank god alone in my bedroom. Read Mrs. Dalloway.

Going through the first 40 minutes or so of this movie, I had so much hope for it. It could had been awesome. The costumes were well done. It’s a period piece in the 50s, the actresses were pretty hot. Then we got past the exposition and to the actual plot part of the movie. Fuck.

Firstly, the choices Watson (Julia Roberts) makes about her love life are completely without motivation and unconvincing. In the first 10 minutes or so, the blatantly heavy handed foreshadowing lets the viewer know who the romantic interest is in the classic “that douche” portrayal. That she would be interested in such a man is antithetical to almost every ideal she espouses in the film.

To be fair, many of us have been infatuated with completely inappropriate people – their inappropriateness only increasing the forbidden appeal, but the love interest was just a huge douche all around with no redeeming qualities.

Also – look at the DVD cover. The three younger girls are shown in left-to-right order of conservative to progressive. Kirsten Dunst’s character is just a completely obvious and one-dimensional champion of “tradition” and the status quo, while Maggie Gyllenhaal is just the atypical slut with a heart of gold. Neither of these characters have much depth. In fact, of the two, only Kirsten Dunst’s character “learns” something, and it’s only because of an unfortunate situation rather than the work of the teacher that causes her to re-examine her worldview.

Julia Stiles character is the only one I actually like. She actually has some depth and delivers a convincing rebuttal to the really retarded “live life”=“career woman” message parroted shittily by Julia Roberts out of a film school script.

How does a river know where to go? Well it has banks to guide it. But what about before it has an established course? How does it choose when it’s but a babe of a rivulet?

A friend of my family died yesterday. They found his body on a bike trail on the outskirts of Thousand Oaks. He had a heart attack and no one knew where he was. Our families were not super close, but still friends. I’d been over at his house a few times with my family.

I think when it’s just a rivulet, its path forms largely by chance. If there happens to be a boulder in the way (maybe an animal knocked it into place), it may just be 5% easier for the water to go left rather than right, and then left it goes!

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I had a sock that got separated from its partner – and it was this way for like 2 months. But I kept on putting it back in the laundry bin, in hopes that I’d find its mate.

And today I did.

The two are different colors now, because one has been washed 10 or so more times than the other — like when a man comes back from a war with new lines and worries on his face, and his wife doesn’t immediately recognize him.

But it’s still the same sock.

—

Thanks Mary for the last line.

• prurient

• excoriate

• exculpatory

• fey

My roommate and I went out to get some Pho soup in La Jolla today. Generally when you get a bowl of Pho, you also get a plate of side-vegetables to add to the soup. But when we got our two bowls of soup today, he brought only one side-plate of veggies.

Immediately, I started bitching. I felt that I should have my own veggies. My roommate, unfazed, calmly called over the waiter and got the second plate of vegetables. By the time the meal was done, we had gone through only 80% of the first plate of side-vegetables. The second plate remained untouched.

I noticed then that while I went immediately to fight a perceived injustice, my roommate just let it go. We then had a long discussion about the matter.

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I couldn’t fall asleep.

We are the men made of memory.

Our bones ache with regret.

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I had to save a file for my Master’s program for the first time today – so I had to move out my old college stuff. I did the same thing when I left high school. I moved everything in the “School” folder to “Archive” and renamed it “High School”. Now I’m going to do the same thing with “College”. And another chapter closes.

I’ve been working full time since June, and am now starting to pile up a substantial sum in my bank account. But it’s just been sitting there in Checking getting eaten away by inflation.

Here are the ways I’ve found to enhance savings at these types of figures:

401k

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I realized over the last few days that work is taking up more and more of my life. But it’s diminishing marginal utility: as it eats up more of my life, it’s not giving me extra utility, and taking away time from other things.

What’s the motivation for working hard? Well, many people would say that working hard is good to advance in the corporate ladder and make more money etc. However, looking at my personal mission statement, which I wrote a few months ago, I can’t find status or money as being particularly important.

I think that’s accurate. Money and status pretty much only bring me happiness to the extent that they aid in the other missions I’ve written down: namely to be an explorer and seek out new experiences. And it has helped. I bought a one-on-one lesson last Saturday on how to surf – and it worked – now I know. That was very rewarding.

So what does this mean? I’ll keep in mind that doing things at work isn’t really an end to itself – and to place some boundaries so that my life doesn’t get out of balance. Hitting personal objectives will come before hitting corporate ones. Selfish? Sure.

So one concrete action item: acquire and maintain a paper schedule book that’s independent of the Outlook one provided by work. The work one only covers work – I’ll flow only the important things down to my real schedule book.

Started in Spring 2009 – an ongoing process.

For myself, I will:

• Not compromise with honesty.

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I stepped outside and after looking around awkwardly a bit, I started running. When was the last time you ran as fast as you could? I feel like when I was a kid, I was always sprinting – always playing some game which involved beating someone somewhere by foot. I can’t even remember the last time I did that though.

The ground passed under frighteningly fast and my legs were unusually long. Probably beacuse the vast majority of my experience sprinting was when I was much shorter. We take things at a much more comfortable walk or jog now.

My life is in a state of high entropy right now.

Let’s start with health. Three weeks ago, I got a nasty bit of poison oak on me, and am now just clearing up all the rashes. I’ve been gone to an exhausting conference in humid northern Virginia for a week, so I haven’t exercised and have been eating fatty food for a week. Additionally I’ve not been getting great sleep. As a result, I’m regrouping there – trying to heal my rashes and canker sores in my mouth (which appear whenever I’m in a state of high stress – like a health coal mine canary).

Sounds bad. I’m also in a pretty bad housing state. My sublet runs out in a week, and I haven’t yet found a new place to live in San Diego. My lease in LA ends this week also, and I still need to move out my furniture and get my deposit back. So I need to close out two leases and start a new one.

Physically, my possessions are in a mess. I packed hastily and now am on my third of four laundry loads to clean all my shit. I lost another fountain pen. I need to get another out of storage.

Work-wise, I’ve missed a week, so I have no idea what the status of my project is. I’m not too worried about that. I also need to make sure my grad school bills are paid so I can start my masters class this quarter.

Regardless of all that shit, I’m not too stressed. I’m just glad to be back in San Diego. Fuck the east coast – hot-ass, humid-ass, bullshit. I have a working car and enough liquid assets to be fine. I just need to attack all my issues methodically and get down to low entropy – so I can start drinking alone again.

I got poison oak two Saturdays ago volunteering for a local park to clear out non-native plants. I think I consumed more societal resources getting medical treatment than I contributed.

I was still able to go to work though, due to my strict regimen of anti-inflammatories, antibiotics, and antihistamines – all washed down with some booze for double potency.

My arms looked like hell, but that was okay. The oozing, the pus, the rotting, the moral decay – it was all hidden beneath the snow white shirtsleeves I usually sport to work.

—

Despite my nightly chemical cocktail, I still had a bit of trouble sleeping last night. I dreamed I was a college freshman again at the arboreal UC Davis. I was going to study English and religion – and I was very excited.

Then I woke up and went to work. I feel like I spend 40 hours a week pretending to be someone else – someone professional. And I like that person more than myself.

I had a dream that I was with a (female) friend waiting for the city bus after school. This must have been in middle school, because that was the only time I took a city bus. We were waiting apart from the others in a building across the street… watching through a window on the second story those behemoths come, pick up children, and pass.

I asked her when our bus was going to come. She said we were waiting for #39, it was now 3:50, and the next one came at 4:30. I thought then how much better it was to own a personal automobile.

And it came to pass that her parents came to pick her up. I thought about asking for a ride home, since we lived nearby, but for some reason I chickened out and she left.

I was left there watching the across-the-street. Time passed until – could it be? It was my bus! I scurried towards the building exit – but found that the building exit was this narrow hole through this metal grate.

Perhaps in a yesteryear I could have easily fit through this hole. But today I put one arm through, and then my head, but then my other arm was stuck. I could put both arms through, but my shoulders were stuck. No matter which way I went about it, I was now too big to fit through the entrance of my fictious childhood hideout.

Then I woke up and drove to work.

I spent four years going to school at UCLA, where I had ambiguous feelings about being living in a big city with a high population density.

After I had gone through the last of my graduations, my parents left. And I, in my apartment alone, unceremoniously packed up the tidbits I had collected over the four years into a some beige cardboard boxes.

Going up the 405, a song by Bob Seger came on the radio:

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This speech references http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ishihara_Mishima.jpg.

Pictured here are two young men in 1956.

In fourteen years, one of them, Yukio Mishima, would lead a group to storm the Tokyo office of the Japan Self-Defense Forces. Decrying Japan’s post war loss of identity, he would go on the balcony and try to incite the soldiers to rebellion. Failing, he’d go inside and commit ritual suicide by disemboweling himself with a knife. He was also considered thrice for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

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On a typical day in acting class we’ll go in there and first thing we do is “warm up” – we’ll stand in a circle and do jumping jacks or try to figure out how to spin our arms in opposite directions. We might play a game in which we walk around imitating animals or making noises.

Tuesday we got up in groups to imitate a factory (using our bodies and making sounds) manufacturing “happy frogs”. Today we got up in groups to do the “Ipod shuffle”, which entailed impromptu performing random songs. If you didn’t know the lyrics, you hummed along or made sounds to represent instruments. Each group had to iterate through about 15 songs.

I don’t think anyone would do this outside of class. In fact, on the first day we were all very shy about doing these “retarded” things, but we slowly got out of our shells. The main message of the class is to not be afraid of failure – that is, it’s better to try very hard and fail spectacularly than to go out with a whimper – that any self-conscious restraint in the realm of performance increases the chance of actual failure. I like this message – I think it’s very true of both theatrical performance and also the performance of many tasks/activities in everyday life.

There’s a small room in McGowan where I go every Tuesday and Thursday. In this room with black walls, I loosen up and fear failure less. There I am probably the closest to my child-self: unafraid to play pretend and unconcerned about looking cool.

So why don’t I expand this small black room into the whole world?

I am amazed that the whole theater company idea is taking off from the ground. It’s not even one particular person – I’m just shocked that so many people seem dedicated to making this work. Maybe it’s a bit early to count our chicks, but it sure seems to be working out. I suppose the limits to our potential as humans really must be only our willpower and energy in changing the world state from the status quo to one of our liking.

Come audition! http://www.sweetsorrowco.com.